The purpose of this effort is to explore the problem of explanation in the human and social sciences using the game of cricket as the model for the exercise. The idea was to improve on the most common approach to the explanation of human action by the two dominant psychological schools - behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Both of them seemed to represent “reduction versus existence”, which was the working title for the project at the time it started.

Problem: How do we account for the sequence of events in a game of cricket?

1. One answer is that it is all determined by the laws of physics.

This runs into the great debate between determinism and indeterminism, which is very technical and hard to call although the balance seems to have shifted to indeterminism in the last 100 years. I am inclined to reject determinism on the grounds that in psychology and society we have emergent entities that cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. A statement of this argument occurs in Popper’s Objective Knowledge (1973), especially the essay “On Clouds and Clocks” which presents a theory of evolution and language to account for human freedom and creativity, within a kind of plastic control exerted by the laws of nature.

We can agree to disagree on the issue of determinism because the outcome of that debate does not resolve the problem of accounting for other influences in cricket like the rules of the game, customs and traditions about the way the game is played and the plans and stretegies of the players.

We may accept that the laws of physics regulate some aspects of the game such as the trajectory of the ball after it leaves the bat. But this is no way to explain the course of the game.